Tag Archives: mother

After I got my first period — less than a month before my twelfth birthday — is right around when the two women began including me in their gabbing sessions, in the kitchen.

At first, I joined reluctantly: I would much rather “waste my life away”, as mother dramatically accused me of, with a novel. But face it! When the two of them returned from their separate errands, both beautiful and smelling of the same perfume — the flirtation of all the men still echoing in their voices — I would be a major “dura” to resist the temptation of their company.

And the stories, the day’s gossip — the life force pumping through the street of our town — seemed more titillating than my mother’s romance novels (through which I, when home alone, would rummage and then re-hide them in the cupboards of her bedside stand). Now: Our neighborhood wasn’t really happening. Someone would die, occasionally, after drinking too much. Someone else got married, before an accidental pregnancy showed. Both the town’s funerals and its weddings could be attended by anyone. For Russians, it’s bad fucking karma to turn guests away! So, as processions crawled through the main roads (not many Russians owned cars, not in those days!), neighbors joined in; because at the end of either line, they’d find free food. And what’s more important: Vodka!

Breathlessly, I listened to the women’s stories, never putting my two kopeks in. Assigned the most menial jobs in the kitchen, like peeling of potatoes or sorting out grains of rice, I kept my head down and worked my ears overtime. At times, the exchange of information was packed with details so intense and so confusing, it hurt my brain to follow. Still, I tried to comprehend in silence because asking either my sis or mother to repeat — was borderline suicidal.

“Now, mamotchka!” (Marinka was already notorious for kissing up. She’d learned how to work our mother’s ego.) “Have you heard about Uncle Pavel?”

“Nyet! What?”

The way my sis was blushing now, in the opal light of fall’s sunset, solidified that she was rapidly turning into her mother’s daughter: A stunner, simply put. The prospects of the townswomen’s matchmaking had already begun coming up at the dinner table; and every time, Marinka turned red and stole sheepish glances at our father. There was no way around it: She was easily becoming the prettiest girl in town! Not in that wholesome and blonde Slavic beauty way, but an exotic creature, with doe eyes, long hair of black waves and skin the color of buckwheat honey.

Marinka carried on. “I got this from Ilyinitchna,” she gulped. She’d gone to far, corrected herself: “Anna Ilyinitchna, I mean.” (The tone of informality common for most Russian women was still a bit to early for Marinka to take on. But she was getting there: Whenever she joined our mother’s girlfriends for tea, she was permitted to address them with an informal “you”.)

Mother was already enticed. “What?! What’d you hear?” she wiped her hands on the kitchen towel and turned her entire body toward my sister.

“He and Tatiana’s daughter…” There, Marinka took notice of me. She looked back at our mother for a go-ahead. The silence was thick enough to be cut with a knife. I pretended to not have heard anything.

But mom had no patience for not knowing: “Oy, Marina! Don’t stretch it out, I beg of you! What did you hear?!”

Sis ran her nails to tame the fly-aways by pushing them behind her ears. Her hair was thick and gathered into a messy construction on the back of her head. Ringlets of it escaped and clung to her sweaty neck.

“Well?! WHAT!”

Whenever mother spoke, I noticed the tension Marinka’s shoulders — a habit of a child who took on a regular beatings from a parent. In boys, one saw defiant thoughts of brewing rebellion. But it looked different in girls. We had to bear. It could take decades to grow out of oppression. Some women never made it out. They would be transferred from the rule of their parents’ household to that of their husbands’. Forgiveness already started seeming too far-fetched.

Marinka blushed again. Lord, give us the courage! “He and Tatiana’s daughter were seen having dinner together in the city. He took her to a rest-aur-ant!” She slowed down, for effect: Dining at Soviet restaurants was NOT a casual happening. “And she was dressed like the last whore of Kaliningrad. She now wears a perm, although I’m sure it’s not her parents’ money that pay for it.” Sis was on a roll. “I mean you see how Tatyana dresses! The thing she wore for her husband’s funeral! A woman of her age should watch such things!”

It felt like something lodged inside my throat. Was it words? Or a hair-thin bone from a sardine sandwich from my breakfast? Although I didn’t understand the situation completely, I knew it wasn’t something that left my brain untarnished.

Mother, by now, was smiling ear to ear. “Hold up! Which daughter?! Oh, Lord! Is it Oksanka?!”

Marinka shot another stare in my direction. You’ll break your eyes, I thought. Oh man, I wanted to get out of there! Blinking rapidly to remove the layer of forming tears — the shame! alas, the shame of it all! — I fished out the next wrinkled potato from the iron basin at my feet and hurriedly scraped it with the dull knife.

“Well, Oksanka, mamotchka! Of course! She’s got that job at the City Hall, remember?”

“Well,” mom shook her head. “WELL. That little bitch! She knows how to get around, I’ll give her that!”

I looked at Marinka, she — at me. Mother bluntness was a common happening but even we were surprised at her bluntness.

“The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” mother concluded. Marinka chuckled, fear freezing her eyelids into an expression of panic. The clock of her girlhood had stopped its final countdown.

Mother gave out her orders for dad to go pick up some of her special bread for dinner. The wide white baguette was the only thing she claimed to be able to eat:

“My stomach is allergic to that other peasant crap!” She, of course, was referring to the bricks of wheat bread that dad and I could devour kilos at a time, given enough garlic and salt. “And why don’t you take the small one with you? Keep her from getting under my feet?”

Dad found me reading inside Marinka’s closet, where I had built myself a beanbag-like chair out of a pile of dirty laundry. This was the only place in our two bedroom apartment where the constant stream of kitchen noises sounded reasonably muffled.

“Hey, monkey!” dad cracked open one of the doors. “Wanna join Papka on a smoking break?”

Before I removed my ear plugs I’d made from cotton balls, I studied the handsome man’s face. He — was my father. Floating above me, nearly at the ceiling, as it seemed, he reminded me of those romantic leads in the old, black-and-white Soviet films: usually some Labor Hero or the best and the brightest of the Party for whom love always arrived after success, and always in a form of the least likely — somewhat homely and nerdy — girl. Dad’s eyes were radiating with tanned wrinkles. His lips were resisting the type of a grin that happened whenever he tried his damn hardest not to act amused at my expense.

“A smoking break? Well. Yeah, sure.” I shrugged one of my shoulders, slipped the index fingers in between the pages of The Master and Margarita, and placed the book face down. (All the reading for our Literature Class I had completed back during my summer at the Pioneer Camp. Since then, I’d been reading everything I could find in my parents’ library, in alphabetical order. Considering I was still making my way through “B’s”, I hadn’t gotten too far. But it took no more than a few chapters to know that this novel could get me into serious trouble.)

Dad stepped back to give me enough room to slip out of my office, and after I wrangled myself out of Marinka’s dirty bathrobe, he examined me head to toe and said: “The consensus is: You might need a jacket.”

“Yeah? Should I wear rain boots, too?”

With one of his forearms, dad moved the tulle curtains and looked out of the window. “Ooh. Yeah,” he nodded. “You’re right. Looks like it might rain.”

I knew that. Lying down on the floor, on my stomach, I was already fishing for the matching rain boot under our bunk bed. In secret, I was hoping that my shoe, of boringly dull rubber, had been lost forever and that I would get to wear Marinka’s pair: They were all shiny, with bright flowers; almost brand new and made in the very exotic country of China. But the dark thing in the furthest corner turned out to be my missing rain boot. That’s alright, I thought. I will inherit the Chinese pair in no time!

“Are we gonna bring an umbrella, too?”

“Nah,” dad looked out of the window again. “We aren’t the type to melt, are we?!”

Shaking the last of the dust bunnies from my abandoned rain boot, I felt a flurry of butterflies in my stomach. Dad chose me! He could’ve gone alone — but he chose my company! The days of his endless travels were long gone. The furthest he would depart these days would be to work on blown over phone lines that connected his Army Unit to what I assumed to be the Kremlin. Still, every evening, the man looked for an excuse to stay out of the house. Smoking was one of them.

As I began to mold into a serious runner at school and refused to wear dresses (besides my mandatory school uniform), dad and I began venturing out on walks. Perhaps it was because my funny predisposition tickled my old man. Being outnumbered had to be an already rough reality long before all three women of our household began menstruating on the same schedule. So, I imagine it was a bit of a relief to discover that at least his youngest offspring could wish for no better occupation than to climb trees, outrun boys; bang nails into drywalls, go fishing or take endless walks through the town. And to make our likeness even more daunting, I wasn’t one to talk much either.

Naturally, I didn’t go questioning as to where the two of us were now heading. Not until we passed the gates of the town’s police station, already shut for the day — its only lightbulb above the main doorway reflecting in the wet asphalt like the second moon — that I asked:

“How come we’re in a hurry?”

Dad’s gait, always evenly paced as if he were marching in the Red Square parade, felt rushed. Normally, he was more aware of the patter of my feet, echoing his own footsteps. But that day, he was moving faster than I expected from our typical “smoking break”. In parts, I’d had to jog a little to keep up.

The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, blew the smoke over this left shoulder, away from me, and said: “Sorry, comrade! We’re picking up your mother’s bread.”

“Well. That’s understood,” I said, then zipped up my windbreaker and got ready to continue jogging, as if on a mission this time. This business of mother’s needs was to be taken seriously. Even I had learned that, by then.

“Understood?” dad smiled. In my response, I had given myself the masculine gender.

“Under-stood,” I nodded, then jogged slightly ahead of him to get a better look at his face. The same grin of his trying hard not to embarrass me was brewing on his lips.

For as long as I could remember, my sister was always afraid of water. She was eight years older than me; and as we both grew up, her inability caused me confusion, delight and pride at my own skillfulness — exactly in that order.

“That’s ‘cause you were born a total daddy’s girl!” Marinka teased me. She was jealous. Obviously.

It had become somewhat of a tradition between the two us to huddle up in her bunk bed at night (until she’d left for college, Marinka would always have the top); and for hours at a time, we flipped through the albums of black-and-white family photos, while Marinka told me the stories that predated me. The stiff pages of teal cardboard smelled like the chemicals from the darkroom. Lying on my stomach, I studied the contours traced by Marinka’s fingers, until my elbows became sore.

In the year of Marinka’s birth — 1967 — the Soviet Union was peaking towards its highest glory. My sister was lucky to be born with a promising future of the citizen of the “Best Country in the World”. But in exchange for that giant favor, our dear Motherland claimed the life our father. Well, not literally, of course: This isn’t your typical sob story, of vague third-worldliness, in which the parents die off too young, leaving their poor children seriously messed-up for the rest of their lives. Dad just had to work a lot, that’s all. So, Marinka wasn’t exposed to a fatherly influence during those tender, formative years.

For weeks, for months at a time the old man would be gone from our household. According to Marinka, it made our mother none too happy.

“Really?” I whispered while patting yet another image of my mother holding her firstborn in a professionally done family portrait, while father was, well, not there.

At that point Marinka would realize she’d gone too far — after all, I was only six years old — and clumsily, she changed the subject: “Ugh! Stop groping my photos so hard! You’re gonna leave a mark!” I sat up into an imitation of her cross-legged position. The secret was to wait for Marinka’s temper flares to fizzle out.

Soon, the story continued.

In response to his woman’s nonsense, father would smile discretely; and mother would have no choice but take his word for it. No, wait. Considering the man never spoke much, it was his silence that she had to trust. And if dad were a cheating, lying scumbag, like the likes of his coworker Uncle Pavel — a handsome, salt ‘n’ pepper haired player with a mustache of a Cossack — he could’ve gotten away with it. I mean, the man was gone all the time. No matter the town or the city in which the family settled (for half a decade at the most), soon enough dad would go off to the same place called “the Polygon”.

Now, that’s exactly the part that Marinka could never clarify for me: While I patted the images of our uniformed father — gingerly this time — she couldn’t explain if he was going to the same place, or if our glorious Motherland had these Polygons up the wahzoo.

“Did mama cry?” I detoured back to gossip.

Marinka considered. “Nah. If she did, I never saw it!” Out came the photo of mother surrounded by her colleagues, laughing at the camera.

What else was the woman to do? After about a week of her spousal absence, mother would begin going over to her girlfriends for dinner nearly every night. Sometimes, Marinka came along. But on Saturdays, all the women dressed up and went to a discoteca, leaving my poor sister to her own devices.

Sure enough, “You idiot!” sis scoffed. “She waited until I grew out of them before she started going out!” For a moment, we both studied mother’s graduation portrait in which she, a Komsomol member, looked like that one actress from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. “You’re so dense sometimes, Irka, I swear!”

Before my sis would succeed in chasing me out of her bunk bed though, I managed to give a decent comeback:

“Ooh! Look at you, using big words and stuff. Dense does as dense sees!”

I don’t know about the rest of the world and its children — who, as our Motherland promised, did NOT have as happy of childhoods as we did — but Marinka’s telltale threats were worse than, say, the warning of the nuclear attack from America. Mom was the biggest disciplinarian around town! Or maybe even in the whole of the Soviet Union!

Sometimes, Marinka did manage to tell on me. But with age, I’d gained enough escape routes from the house, to never let my mother’s disciplinarian belt to graze the skin of my ass. If worse came to worst, I climbed out of our kitchen window and hid in the giant pear tree, in the garden. No one but armies upon armies of honey bees was ever much interested in that giant monster anyway. In the summer, they flunked the heavy branches of sour fruit. But for the rest of the year, that pear tree made an excellent hiding place.

Besides, from an early age, I had noticed the difference in the athletic predispositions between the women of our family. That is to say that my mother and sister had none! I, on the other hand, was the best son that father could ever desire! I could run faster than any of the boys in my elementary school, and had scabs to show for it. Playing with my sister’s girlfriends didn’t interest me in the least, unless, of course, they were jumping rope. Then, I was like a grasshopper gone berserk inside a glass jar. And nothing transcended me into a better sense of zen than to climb trees and to organize and reorganize my father’s tool box, over and over again.

Having arrived to the city a few hours earlier, father walked around the bus terminal in hopes of running into Inna and her mother, en their route back home.

“Bad news from Baykalsk,” Inna overheard from where her mother had run off, to hug her handsome, uniformed husband. The hush among the other awaiting passengers meant that mother’s emotional outburst earned her the desired audience, yet again. Her legs below the pink-lavender skirt appeared shapely; and her heels, that lifted out of the boats of the red stilettos, as reached to kiss her man, were round and soft.

Father’s mother — an Amazonian looking woman, with arms of sinew and leathery skin earned by working in the fields of the town’s collective farm — had suffered a heart attack that morning. Inna’s grandfather, who could never beat his wife in rising early to tend to their livestock, found her still in bed, after he had returned from the outhouse.

“Will you look at her?!” he joked, at half voice, nudging the sheeted mound under which his wife had always slept, with her head fully covered. “I think I’m feeding this one for nothing!”

As Inna remembered, there was always a bawdy familiarity between her grandparents, something that she had never witnessed in her own parents’ interactions. When the tall woman worked in the kitchen, sweating over steaming pots or pummeling dumpling dough with admirable punches, Inna, who liked to hide out on top of the brick stove, had often watched her grandfather come up from behind his wife and land a loud smack onto his wife’s hips. He would then leave his hand resting there, while he nuzzled her neck and demanded to be given a taste of things. The woman would laugh and attempt to shake her husband’s hand off her ass, his chin — off her shoulder; but even Inna could see she wasn’t trying too hard.

The display of such affection tickled the girl. But Inna’s mother had a different reaction:

“Such peasants!” she had once muttered as the family gathered for dinner, in the garden behind the grandparents’ house.

That early evening, grandmother, having climbed onto a short ladder, was reaching for the top branches of overgrown raspberry bushes, from which she was retracting giant, fuzzy berries, still warm from that day’s sun. Her kerchief had slid off, and the cotton housedress, of matching material, rode up the woman’s legs to reveal the white elastic bands that held up her brown knee-highs. For the first time, Inna took notice of her grandmother’s stark white skin and her protruding veins. It was drastically different from the supple and brown skin of her mother, who had, minutes ago, came down from tanning on the house rooftop, for most of that afternoon.

When the men entered the gate, from their day of flipping hay in the field, all the women perked up. Mother began to giggle and trace her hand over the top of her breasts, as if to wipe away the sweat from the hours of leisure in the sun, but then leaving it there to linger. Inna’s aunt — a tall and slim woman with brutally protruding facial bones — checked her reflection in the brass samovar, that mounted the wooden table like a tzar before his court. A field of mismatching serving dishes — covered with lids or saucers that warded off the flies — began to accumulate around the samovar.

The men, tired but boisterous from the gulps of home-brewed, iced beer, attacked the table on which Inna’s aunt kept rearranging the assortment of zakuski.

“Get! Get!” the aunt began shooing them away, slapping their tan, hairy arms with a kitchen towel. The men, grumbled and laughed; but managed to lift up the saucers and stick their dirty fingers into their contents, smacking their lips in approval.

Having grabbed a handful of scallions and ducked them into a nearby cup of salt, Inna’s grandfather was the first to scurry off.

“Papa!” Inna’s mother scolded him, flirtatiously.

The old man paid her no attention. Instead, he approached his wife, who remained unperturbed by the presence of men and the commotion they have caused among the younger women. With each reach, her housedress continued riding above and below the white elastic bands at her knees; and she continued sizing up each berry with a concentration of a scientist. Grandpa watched at first, the stems of scallions still sticking out of his mouth, moving in unison, as he chewed them. When the plan of action appeared to have finally formulated in his head, he discarded the last of the stems with a theatrical gesture, ran up on his wife, and stuck his head underneath her dress.

“Oy, Vanya! Vanyetcka!” — grandmother couldn’t help but laugh — “Vanyush, oy!” She slapped her husband’s balding head hidden under her dress but managed to mostly miss her target. The old man lifted her off the ladder; and despite the flurry of her disoriented slaps and girly punches, delivered her to the dinner table.

The young couples looked on. Inna’s father, sitting on the bench, stole occasional glances while he gnawed on rectangular slices of salt-curried fatback. The boyfriend of Inna’s aunt now busied himself with loosening, rolling and lighting up some tobacco. Meanwhile, Inna, surprised by her grandfather’s strength, grinned while making a go of stealing handfuls of warm raspberries that spilled from her grandmother’s basket, onto the table top.

Mother — alas! — interrupted the silence: “In-na?” she said in her suddenly uptight, authoritarian voice, the sound of which made Inna’s stomach tighten. “What do we do with our hands before dinner?”

Every adult at the table seemed to look over. Inna looked for her father; but finding him preoccupied with fishing out semi-pickled cucumbers from a barrel in the shadow patch in the garden’s corner, she had no choice but to admit defeat. She earned a light yank by the scruff of the tattered sailor’s undershirt that used to belong to her grandfather, which she had made a habit of wearing; and was sent to wash up, upstairs.

“How many times must I repeat myself?” mother hissed.

Only when both mother and daughter reached the dirt room of the house that Inna was made privy to the cause of her mother’s sudden irritation: “Such peasants, these people!” she muttered. Her face appeared to harden, all the sun-induced laziness of her movements gone instantaneously.

“Ah, dear god!” mother was now saying with an admirable annunciation for someone crying her eyes out. With her face pressed against her husband’s decorated lapel, mother reminded Inna, yet again, that she was quite a small woman. “At least, she died in her sleep,” mother said with a quivering voice, reaching for her husband’s ear on her tippy toes. “At least, she didn’t suffer.” She paused, to then crescendo to a sob, followed by: “My god, I loved her so much!”

Inna’s father appeared to be at a loss. He stared at the tips of his shoes and shifted from one foot to another. He soon looked up to find Inna who fumbled with the now filthy bit of dough between her fingers. Her eyes, welled-up with giant tears, were on him all this time.

Father winked: “What’s happening, my brown-eyed girl?” he said.

On that, mother wiped her own face with the giant polkadot bow at her left shoulder and shot Inna a look. It was enough for Inna’s eyes to release their tears. She began to blink rapidly, focusing only on the sensation in her finger tips. Through the blur, she saw her father motion her over; to which Inna gratefully surrendered, fitting herself another his free arm and letting her tears soak the side of his jacket, near the pocket with a bundle of keys.

“Everything will be alright, my little larks,” she heard her father say. “I promise: Everything will be alright.”

And the lavashes were indeed worth the wait! Still warm and covered in flour, against Inna’s skin, they felt like those smooth boulders from the beaches of Odessa, upon which she, as a child-delegate to the biggest Soviet Pioneer Camp — the Artek — used to fall asleep. After being pummeled by the waves of the Black Sea, she would crawl out and rest atop of them, out of breath and tired out by all that laughter and by the salty water that tickled, stung and got inside her nose, eyes and mouth. The sun, permanently in high zenith, as it seemed, shone onto her like an anomaly unseen in the moody climates of Russia to which the family continued to relocate for her father’s job. And only the fear of being left behind by her Artek teammates would keep Inna awake.

Eventually, she managed to talk her parents into signing her out for the whole afternoon at a time and taking her to the beach with them. It was their month-long summer vacation, for which the family had been saving up for nearly half a year; and it appeared to be one the more exceptional times in her parents’ marriage, when mother was jolly at every visit. She sported a brand new haircut a la Mireille Mathieu and a collection of summer dresses Inna had never seen her wear before. On their downhill walk from the Artek campus to the beach, mother, who trotted ahead, let the wind take a hold of her skirt and reveal the back of her highs, all the way up to that part where during the winter, on their outings to banya, Inna would notice long and curly black hairs, coarser than anywhere else along mother’s body. If ever the wind did scandalous tricks with mother’s dress, Inna looked up to notice her father’s grin, thrilled and shy; and if he appeared embarrassed at all, it was at being caught glancing at his wife with this much pleasure. Inna felt delighted: She knew she was witnessing something secret about her parents; something she could not yet understand, but knew it had to be a very good sign.

By the time Inna would wake up on the beach, however, suddenly chilly from the cold breeze of the sunset yet still finding some warmth on the boulder’s surface, she would find her father nearby, in his swimming shorts and asleep underneath a newspaper. Only a trace of her mother’s body could be found in the flattened patch of beach sand next to him. To console the 10-year old Inna about such a stealthy departure took more than her father’s patient explanation about mother’s obligations to visit friends in Odessa: It took three cones of chocolate ice-cream.

The warm flatbreads that brought on the memories of that summer now stretched between Inna’s fingers and teeth. Inside each bite, she tasted the chewy texture that, if combined with a warm glass of milk, could make a soul howl for the ways of her motherland! The two women would take turns pinching the edges of the breads that stuck out of her mother’s sizable purse, while they made their way to the bus stop; then again while waiting for the bus. Inna’s mother would eat only until a parent of one of her students — current or former — showed up on the platform. She would become all business then, shaking the crumbs off her clothes and asking for Inna to remove any residue of the flour from her face or decolletage. She then left Inna to her own devices, to harbor the hopes that perhaps once aboard the bus, mother would drop all this formality again and return to the repeated game of discussing just how good this batch of purchased lavashes turned out to be:

“Best ever!”

“Better than that one time, remember?”

“Yes, yes. But remember that other time, when they were a little burnt along the edges? So crunchy!”

This time would be no different. While mother chatted up the father of her leading Math student, Inna stole pinches of the warm, stretchy dough from the purse. Out of the dough, she began to sculpt geometric shapes whose names they’ve learned in the last academic quarter. Turned out: a cube was a more cooperative structure. Each of its ribs could be measured by the tips of Inna’s index fingers and thumbs. Interestingly, no matter the change of a tactic, the surfaces a pyramid defied precision and demanded more focus.

“Hypotenuse is a rat,” Inna recited a rhyme they’d learned in order to remember the function of this foreign name and concept. “And it runs from an angle to an angle…”

In the midst of conforming a perfect sphere into an ovoid, Inna noticed a figure of a man nearing their platform. He was coming from the furthest removed corner of the bus stop. Dressed in military uniform, he carried a small travel bag of brown leather. In all of his movements, the man possessed a certain manner of discipline and economy. Everything about him said: order, cleanliness, grace.

“Papka,” Inna uttered to herself — a habit for which she was lucky to not have yet earned the reputation of being strange.

At her school she was mostly thought of as quiet; and being the smallest child in her class, was also considered the weakling of the group. However, she could never own up to the consequences of her character alone: So vapid and wide-spread was the reputation of her mother, she felt she would walk in her mother’s shadow until she herself, once grown, would move to a big city and become a famous Soviet ballerina. Or the first female astronaut to land on the moon. Then, they would all realize just how special she was, all along!

“Mom,” she tugged the scratchy material of the pink-lavender skirt. (How ever did this woman manage to survive in a wool skirt, in the balmy, mid-August air? Suffering certainly had to be a part of mother’s love of fashion.)

Mother, in the throws of laughter at something her Math student’s father had said, ignored Inna’s hand. “Mama!” Inna tugged again, rougher.

With a single look darted over her shoulder, mother caught Inna’s wrist with feline precision, suddenly forgetting about protecting her fresh nail polish from an accidental scratch. Her eyes shimmered with aroused temper:

“What. Have I taught you. About interrupting when adults are talking?” she slowly pushed the words through the tightly closed crowns of her front teeth.

Inna felt her stomach tighten, as it always did whenever she found herself in trouble. The Math student’s father was witnessing it all.

Inna lowered her eyes then lifted them again with pleading courage, “But mama… It’s papa.” And before tears deformed her mouth and speech, she made a vague gesture in the direction of the Army officer, who by now — having noticed the two women himself — was making a determined, yet balletic stride across the platform.

At the risk of missing their bus, Inna’s mother insisted on stoping by the kiosk that, judging by the sour smell of yeast and the line of bickering women upfront, had recently received a delivery of fresh bread. It was an otherwise insignificant place, like most stores in larger cities. As a matter of fact, when the kiosk windows were rolled down and locked, one could easily mistake it for an information booth, with nothing inside but trolley tickets and city brochures, and Marlboros for sale.

A Russian housewife was only as successful as she was savvy. It was up to the women — the mothers — to discover stores that carried better produce. Some of the legwork was done by their girlfriends, in a tradition of some old tribal hunt, adjusted to the urban life style. Even the women in Russian villages, who aimed to live by the means of the land, needed to perfect this skill for when shopping at the weekend bazaar. But Inna’s mother was too proud to probe other women for insider information on barters and schedules of deliveries of deficit produce. To socialize with the common folks, especially about such common needs, was beneath her academic degrees and esteemed profession, she claimed; unworthy of her upbringing in the largest port city with Western waterways, from the Russian East Coast. She was an elementary school teacher, painfully overqualified, who taught at Inna’s school that housed grades one through eleven; and most parents in their village wanted for their children to end up in her mother’s classroom, despite her famous and slightly abusive educational methods. (Inna had known those methods first-hand, for they had been honed on her, until she officially reached puberty and got her period.)

Mother refused to make friends with any woman with a child of seven years old or younger. And by the rest of them, she claimed to be bored:

“I just wish I had a girlfriend to take me to the ballet, Innotchka,” she confessed to her daughter, melancholically. It was an uneasy situation whenever mother began talking like that, as if Inna were her contemporary. But just as Inna was an assumed loner, being the only child of her parents — who were the only children to their parents as well — her mother, she suspected, had difficulty making friends as well.

Whenever the woman was in of those confessional moods, she tended to look down and to the side, as if reading her lines from the edge of the peeling wallpaper, dreamily:

“Ah! If only you knew how I love the ballet, Innotchka!” But despite the mood of informality, Inna knew better than to trust this yet another attempt by her mother to bond. “One day (when you’re old enough), I may take you there, so that you can see for yourself,” her mother would zero in on Inna, suddenly viewing her daughter as a female competition, and her warmth would rapidly dissipate. “I may. I just may. I can’t promised it, of course. But I may.”

In the summer of 1991, the two women would journey into the city quite frequently. Mother had applied to the Masters of Education faculty at the Pedagogical University No. 3. Every academic institution, from kindergartens to the top level institutes that trained the best minds of Russia’s science, was assigned a number. And although Inna, during the trips into the city, had never come across the Pedagogical University No. 1 or No. 2, she was sure her mother would not possess any trustworthy information on this curious matter either. Most likely, she would grant Inna the chronic “It’s just the way it is!” response. Inna’s own school — where mother had established a certain reign, especially since deciding to further her credentials — was assigned the number 7. She realized she had never tried to decipher this puzzle before. Perhaps, on certain topics, mother was right: Some things — were just the way they were.

On the way back from her mother’s interview with the dean of her future faculty, the two women had stumbled upon a display of oval white flatbreads in the window of a curios little kiosk. It stood at the entrance of an alley of chestnut trees which would lead them to the city’s main transit station. Inna, with her eyes studying the tips of her and her mother’s shoes, while mother talked and talked — this time about just how “cultured” the dean had acted toward her, a real gentleman not to be found in a single kilometer radius of their own village — she noticed when her mother’s feet slowed down, their oval toes slightly tilting away, at a forty-five degree angle, as if pulled by a magnet.

“Oy, dear god! Are those little lavashes?!” her mother, with her fingers still splayed from that afternoon’s manicure, touched both of her cheeks and exclaimed. “I haven’t had those since I was just a little girl! My daddy used to bring them for me from his trips to Georgia.”

Inna adjusted her mother’s purse that she had been carrying since they left the nail salon, then moved up the adult size prescription glasses to the bridge of her nose from its tip, and gave the object of her mother’s curiosity a considerable study.

“They are! Oy, they are, they are! They are little lavashes! Oy, dear god!” Mother was under a spell.

Inna, who had been trained well enough to know that all of her mother’s sudden outbursts had to have specific objectives, had recently begun to notice her own decreasing desire to figure them out. With her stubborn, teenage silences toward any hints, she figured out that her mother’s desires would become obvious, whether she tried to decipher them on her own. Or, she could just wait. Oftentimes, those objectives would become clear. Some would be meant to provoke pity from any witnesses; and it confused Inna by giving her no active understanding on what to do next. Certainly, mother couldn’t have thought of pity being a good match to her self-proclaimed dignity!

By now, her mother was trotting. She was wearing a tailored skirt the color of pink-lavender and a custom-made black-and-white blouse with polkadots and a giant bow on the left side of her neck. Her red stilettos, claimed to be the best damn pair of shoes mother currently owned, made her legs more defined, although still quite plum for mother’s short frame. Adjusting the handles of the sizable purse again, Inna thought: Were she not the daughter of this woman, who was jittering lusciously in all the right places while running through the alley of trees (that used to fill the air with an aggressive perfumed smell of blossoms, back in July), she would think of this sight as some famous passage from an Italian film, in which the women — who all seemed to suffer from outbursts of erratic and unpredictable emotions — were the only ones in the whole of the world’s cinema to even slightly resemble the women of her own culture.

By the time Inna had caught up to her mother, having been weighed down by her sizable purse and the damn oversized glasses that refused to stay in place, mother was already lingering by the kiosk window. With her hands folded on top of each other over the giant polkadot bow, she jumped a couple of times in place, causing for the other women to look on, askance. They were right: There was something insincere in the forcefulness of mother’s emotional exposés, especially when they involved retardation into her girlhood. In the now obvious and not necessarily pleasant silence that surrounded them, Inna continued to clutch the handles of the purse with her both hands, while stealing glances at the other women who by now resumed their hushed conversation.

“Um. Excuse me, lady citizen?” her mother cut the line. Surely, that would not go over well with the other women! “Do you have a sufficient supply of lavashes left?”

The cashier woman behind the sweating window, who was in the midst of picking out a half a kilo of rugelach pastry for the kerchiefed woman at the head of the line, stopped her plump hands in midair and shrugged; then resumed bending over the plexiglass bin:

She responded “I have what I have,” and smiled a slightly sadistic smile that sat well on the faces of all small persons of Russian authorities: secretaries to big bureaucrats and heads of the custodian labor unions. “You’re gonna have to take you place in line, LIKE everyone else, and see for yourself!”

The kerchiefed woman scoffed, slightly shook her wrinkled head and rolled her milky-gray eyes in a conspiring gesture. Inna’s mother feigned being immune toward the meaningfully condescending responses that trickled down to the hummed exchange among the other women. There had been times when Inna had witnessed it go a different way, however: Sometimes, mother teared up at the injustice and at the disheartening simpleton nature of her fellow citizens, while always managing to stand in enough light to be noticed by her offenders. Other times, she chose to suffer through the unfortunate consequences to her own bouts of aristocracy. Considering that these baked delicacies were impossible to come by in their village, this would be one of those times. So, Inna’s mother squinted her eyes, as if studying other choices of produce that may interest her; then made her way to the back of the line.

“Are you last?” she asked a woman with an eggplant-colored perm and a still fresh layer of frosty pink lipstick on her narrow lips.

“Umn-da?” the woman nodded. Inna wondered if the Italian women from the films also possessed such a succinct vocabulary of arrogant gestures.

Inna’s mother, again, appeared to be oblivious to her dislikable affect on the group: “How wonderful!,” she said gleefully, “I’m — after you!” Then, she yanked Inna by her elbow, to take her place in line.

When she first arrived, the older woman took off her shoes before stepping over the threshold. Unusually considerate, light in her step, she made her daughter nervous.

There had been superstitions, back in her mother’s country, about thresholds, doorways, windows. Table tops and chairs. And they were treated like traditions by the women in her family, as non-negotiable as laws of gravity and just as final. To never kiss over a threshold. To never sit upon a tabletop. To never let an unmarried woman be positioned at a corner seat, while dining. And with the slew of superstitions came antidotes, just as important to take notice of; so that when things did NOT work out — the victim could be still the one to blame: You shoulda knocked three times on wood, spit over the left shoulder, and hidden a fig hand in your pocket. These things would grow on one unconsciousness like barnacles of paranoid behavior. And in a nation of world-renowned courage, it puzzled her to see so many doubtful people.

And was her mother brave at all, to just pack-up like that and leave? To move herself with a child to the furthest removed continent, after the death of her husband? His — was a death by drinking. She didn’t want to die — by mourning.

And now, both women — tired but not tired enough to not be cautious of each other — seemed to be waiting for something. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, albeit both of them standing barefoot in the empty kitchen. In this new country, where everyone was in love with fun and smiley faces, they each would arrive to their shared home and try to force a lightness to descend. It would be mostly out of habit, and not desire. Her mother functioned better in these new rules: “Have fun!” “God bless!” “I love you!” She had no difficulty throwing these around, without taking any time to match their implications to the worth of the recipient.

The younger woman now waited by the sink full of dishes. After enough silence, while stealing glances at her mother, who floated from one room to another like a trapped moth, the hostess began to rummage through the dirty dishes.

Had mother always colored her hair with that unnatural shade of black, when last she’d seen her, in New York? The snow white roots came in aggressively, all over mother’s head, opposing the other color with no mercy. When did she age this much? When did this fear and sorrow find time to settle on her face?

A paw of pity stroked across the young woman’s tightly wound nerves:

“Mom. Why don’t you sit down?” She caught herself: All furniture was made of boxes, uncouth for a woman with a living husband, according to her mother’s generation. Before the older woman managed to react, the daughter hid her gaze in forming mounds of soapsuds and hurriedly amended her first offer: “Mom. Wouldn’t you like a drink?”

She turned and walked away again — floating, balancing, looming — stopped by the sliding doors of the balcony, at the edge of the living-room. The palm trees slowly swayed outside like metronomes to one’s slower heartbeat. West, West, West.

She’d gone out West, with nothing but the ghosts checked-in as her luggage. The letters from her best friend on the East Coast would hit the bottom of the mailbox on a weekly basis, for the first two months. She praised her for the courage. She mentioned pride, and dignity, and all the other things they’d mutually gotten high on, back in college.

It never happened in any of the books she’d read, but in her life, what others titled “courage” — was merely an act of following through. Besides, she swore, he thought of the idea first. What else was she suppose to do?

The best friend wrote her with gel pens, whose color was always given careful consideration.

She wrote in pink: “It’s better to let it all go to the wind.”

In purple: “Let justice work itself out.”

At least, unlike the others, the best friend never judged. She wasn’t in a habit of taking sides. She never called the husband names. But then again, they’d never really found men to be the leading topic of their friendship. Men merely existed. Some men were good. And back in college, the two of them hadn’t loved enough men to speak of the other gender with that scornful nostalgia of the other women. Men merely existed. And then: There was the whole of the magnificent world outside.

Out here — out West — she could just start from scratch. She only needed to remember how to breathe the even breath: if not that of her calmer youth — then of her wiser self. With time, she knew she’d see the point of it, the purpose, the lessons of her little losses. She had too vivid of an imagination to not weave her life into a story.

“One’s life had meaning. It couldn’t be for forsaken.” (Oh, how she missed those wonderful convictions of her youth!)

So, while she waited to mature into that wiser self, she set aside some time and space in which the hurting self could flail, abandon graces, wag its finger, then call people back with tearful apologies. But she would not have to confront her past out here, at least; except for when she opened the envelopes of her phone bills.

“So,” mother started speaking to the window, again. “Natasha? Are you looking for a job?”

“I have been looking, yes, mom.”

“Okay,” mom turned around. Change of subject: “I hear Mike got a promotion for doing the work on that new bridge, in Brooklyn.”

When rinsing a knife after all pungent foods, one absolutely must use soap. Because if not, the taste will resonate on every meal for further weeks to come.

“Oh yeah? That’s good.”

“Yeah! He’s a smart boy! I’ve always liked Mike. For you.”

It’s better if the handle of the knife is anything but wooden. Wood stays a living thing forever. It takes on other substances, breeds them, doesn’t let them go.

Here comes the second round. Ding, ding, ding:

“I wrote Mike a letter.” Mom searched for the effects of her intentions on her daughter’s face. “I know! I know! It sounds silly! We live a borough away. But I have always relished his opinion.”

She felt exhausted. “Mom.”

Out West, she’d found herself relearning how to use each thing with an appropriate instrument. The sense of wonderment! The love of unexpected beauty! The curiosity she was resuscitating in herself, like a paralysis patient learning how to walk again. Her days weren’t daunting, at all times; and they were full of curiosity.

And now: Mom, barefoot yet armed! In one woman’s kitchen. So fearful, she could not release either of them from their pasts. They stood, displeased with being a reflection of each other. Another eyebrow arch. A scoff. One turned away, demonstratively disappointed. The other looked down onto her pruned fingers submerged into a sink of cruddy water.

Mom faced the window with no curtains, yet again. Those horrid, flapping, plastic blinds had been the first thing that Natasha’d taken down. For the first weeks, she let the wind roam through the apartment, while she, sleepless and exhausted, observed the palm trees wave against the never pitch-black night of her new city: You are alright. Remember breathing?

“I like it,” one said, “I think” (unusually sheepishly for her nature). “It’s got some,” she rotated her wrists up in the air, looking for the less poetic word, “‘good light’.” It took a talent to be so vague. Or it took years of mutual knowledge and histories of hurt.

The younger one averted her eyes quickly. She was getting better at busying herself in the kitchen. Throughout her childhood, she’d witnessed mother’s chaos when other people came over to visit their place. They had been lucky that way, due to her father’s reputable profession: Always finding better living quarters, so others came over quite a bit. Wanting to be the talk of the town, mother buzzed and chattered in the kitchen; and she would bang the drawers with aluminum dinnerware and slam the cupboards in an orchestra of her exhibitionist domesticity.

While mother whipped up meals and refilled drinks, her girlfriends wandered around nosily, every once in a while coming upon a tiny girl, with eyes so large they took up half of her face, playing her own game of house in the furthest corner of the bedroom. Alone.

“So cute!” the women hissed, turning on their heels unhappily for having to divert their poking.

Mother continued conducting the percussions in her kitchen:

“She’s so quiet, that child! She’s all — my husband!”

The women moved about the living-room; lurked by the family’s photographs; touched, shifted, sniffed, demanded to know the origin of things:

“You are one lucky bitch, I hope you know.”

“They meant it as a compliment,” after the women’s departure, mother would attempt to clarify things — the delicate things that her daughter could not understand yet (but perhaps with time, she would). The evil smirk of the local Algebra teacher branded itself into her memory: How could these women mean anything good? But mother didn’t want to hear it: “Stop asking stupid questions anyway! This is adults’ business.”

But now:

“So,” the older woman spoke from the bedroom doorway and eyed the open, empty space. “Are you going to ask Mike to ship you the bed?” (Pause.) “Or do you plan to house this draft in here forever?”

“What do you mean by that?” the young woman stopped, knife in her hand.

“I mean, haven’t you, guys, divided things up officially yet?”

The young woman looked back down at the gutted pickled fish under her fingers, on the cutting board. It was a task that every Russian woman performed from A to Z. From A to YA. From A — to I. Her mother would’ve drowned the detailed fish in a pool of sunflower oil; and it would stare out, with dehydrated eyeballs from underneath a layer of butchered onions meant to cover up a job so messily performed.

While peeling onions, mom would begin to cry demonstratively:

“Oy! I so pity the little bird!”

What did the bird have to do with the fish? The bird — to I. The I — to eye. Still, mother was a funny actress, so the child would spit with laughter. She couldn’t help it: She was still in love with her original prototype back then.

She now thought of that one time a thin fishbone lodged in her throat for a week; and how she gagged every night, while mother hooked her sharp nails into the back of her tongue. For months to follow, sometimes, loose scales would reveal themselves stuck on her clothes or skin; or swimming in buckets of water with floor-scrubbing rags. Mom was a disaster in the house.

In her own kitchen, however, the young woman never kept the head. She wished she had a cat to feed it to. A cat — to make-up for the missing child, to make the loneliness less oppressive. She stared at the oval crystal bowl, with even filets of pink meat, neatly arranged.

She herself was a better housekeeper, yet heading toward a divorce nonetheless. Most likely:

“Mike and I aren’t talking, mom. You know that.”

“Oh! Yes. I see,” the old woman eyed the empty bedroom yet again: Why so much space for someone with defeated ovaries then? “You, young people! You have no concept of marital endurance any more.”

She swore, he thought of the idea first. At least, that’s how she remembered it. In his defense (why was she so willing to defend him?): In his defense — she wasn’t “willing”. He was right.

“It’s just that… something isn’t working,” Mike told her over the phone, the week of one Thanksgiving which they’d agreed to spend apart. He “couldn’t do it anymore”. Her work. Her books. Why was he always taking second place after her life? Once she hung up, she cried, of course, but mostly out habit; and out of habit, she started losing weight and sleep. That’s what a wife in mourning was supposed to look like, she decided. She cropped her hair, and started wearing pants and laced up wingtip shoes. In their crammed-in basement apartment in the Bronx, she found room to pace and wonder, “Why? Why? Why?”

Her girlfriends were eventually allowed to visit the site of her disastrous marriage. They bitched; they called him names. They lurked, touched, shifted, sniffed. They studied family photographs, still on display, for signs of early check-outs. The women patted her boyish haircut and teared up a bit too willingly, some of them — being slightly grateful for feeling better about their own men.

And then, one balmy New York August afternoon, she called him from a pay phone in Harlem.

“Meet me for dinner.”

An hour later, he showed up with lilies. After a dry peck that tasted unfamiliarly, she lead the way to a Dominican joint whose wall-full of French doors was always taken down for the summer. It breathed the smell of oil — and of fried everything — onto the sweaty pedestrians on Broadway.

On their side of the missing wall, the night dragged on with a strained politeness. His eyes were glossy, wet. She stared out onto the street. From either the heat of New York’s August and the lack of ventilation, the giant buds sweated under the plastic wrap; and by the time they finished picking through a pile of fried plantains, the lilies open completely, and just like everything at that time of the year — from sweat glands to subway sewers to perfume shops — they began to smell aggressively, nearly nauseating.

“I’m going to California,” she announced after finishing her white fish.

“Why?”

She looked down: After their six-month separation, she had begun to wear dresses and curl her hair again. She’d gained a certain swagger in the hips from wearing flat shoes through every season in New York. The flesh of femininity was finally beginning to lose the aftertastes of her youth’s self-loathing.

Not having gotten an answer, “When?” — he examined her with wet eyes of a lab.

She looked down again. The suppleness of her brown chest surprised her. She looked up: “Soon.”

Vagueness as a revenge: She’d learned that from her mother, the best that ever was! She owed him nothing. He was the one who’d given up! He was the one who left! But now, it settled at the bottom of her stomach, along with the plantains, like something begging for its freedom. And she, in her defense, was no longer “willing”.

Was it just her, or had life begun to feel like an army of ants crawling through one’s capillaries? Did enthusiasm eventually give room to tiredness, when overcrowded by one’s disappointments? She watched the cautionary tale of her mother’s wilted curiosity; sitting in the downward-turned corners of her mouth, waiting to expire, along with the last of her youth? Waiting —

Until There Was None.

If ever mother had the patience, the awareness and the discipline enough to write her autobiography — for, surely, she had the vanity enough! — that should’ve been its tittle. Until There Was None.

But the joy: Where had it gone from her? There would still be moments of visible glee, some days — a sort of tightly wound hysteria; the same inside job that made her mother’s face quiver and the loose skin of her arms shake after each gesture. She’d be like that in front of her girlfriends when seeking their alliance via pity; or in front of the 17th Century paintings in the galleries of Eastern Germany. (Then, she would always speak to Nola, lecturing, lying, not knowing how to stop.) The sight of it — Nola eventually found herself despising (in men especially, much later): of something pushing — being pushed — past one’s irritability, beyond the limit of tolerance and truth. Strained. Pushed. Perpetually trying.

Silence and walking away, to Nola, seemed easier. And it was reasonable, in theory, for people to coexist in a peaceful fulfillment of their basic needs. But then, they would always tangle themselves up in the ideas of the pursuit of their own happiness, where flaunting of entitlement and justice would become a sport. The calmness of a grateful life had long surpassed her mother — that woman was way, way far down the line. And all there was to live by — was a long list of her grievances and other people’s debts.

“You’re just like your father!” her mother threw at Nola, as if being calm and good was somehow indecent. Once Nola turned twelve, however, there wouldn’t be much left to hurl at her expense. Because before, when the two women found themselves alone in the house, mom reached for anything to throw: her father’s rain boots, the ribbed hose from the Soviet-made (read: nearly useless) washing machine; wet laundry; mom’s patent leather belt from the fur coat that she’d demanded for her thirtieth birthday.

One time, unrooted by her madness, the woman tipped a pot of cold cabbage soup that had been sitting on the stove, waiting for her father’s dinnertime. She had been panicking in the kitchen — (mom always panicked, in the kitchen) — and when she found her words surpassing their brutality, she speedily relayed her gaze from one sharp object to the next; and after an unsuccessful search, reached up behind and steadily poured the pot of cold liquid onto Nola’s head. The slimy cabbage crawled under the collar, under the skin; and the orange, chalky layer of frozen oil tangled up in her hair and stayed there for weeks to come. When finally, most of the liquid hit the floor, Nola looked up: Not one, but two women stood there, drenched in terrible humiliation.

For the first time, that night, Nola had gone beyond forgiveness. Mom was susceptible to losing her control, she realized; but from some losses, one could not come back.

“You’re just like her father!”

Blunt objects or her mother’s limbs ungracefully ended their trajectories anywhere along Nola’s small body. If she tipped over, mom dragger her by the hair to rooms with better lighting, where harsher punishment ensued. While mother pushed and pushed and pushed — the child stood, or lied still, in silence. She learned to receive. She bared. She endured. And secretly she hoped that surrender would make her mother slow down. So visible was mother’s sorrow, so palpable — unhappiness, that from behind the raised arm with which Nola guarded softer places, she pitied her aggressor. She waited for the feeling of tremendous heat in all the new swellings. She’d welcome them, eventually giving herself over to resignation, and to sleep. A strange bliss would be found at the end of every horror. For one was never given more than one could handle.

In those days, Nola still could still portion out the world into manageable pixels. There would anger. Disappointments. A one unhappy woman. Through repetition, Nola learned that mother’s love was functioning through let down expectations. If one was loved by her — one owed her, forever. The closer Nola neared her own womanhood, the more difficult, the more unbearable would become that love — and debt; until one day, none in her family could ever able undo, unsay the things that they had thrown at each other, in an attack or self-defense. And in the loss of reason between all cause and effect, it would begin to feel like pure insanity.

And then, one summer, mom had admitted herself to a resort on the Ukrainian Republic’s shore, famous for housing patients of political insanity and tuberculosis. She dropped off Nola at the house of her in-laws, called up her husband and said that she had lost the sight of “her own woman”, and that she was going away, to find her self, for an indefinite amount of time.

Unheard of! Scandal! Her father’s mother ranted for about a week. But quite quickly, the old woman focused on saving the family’s face and made up more suitable stories about her daughter-in-law’s passage.

“Yeah, a bleeding ulcer. I know: that poor thing! She hadn’t eaten for a month!”

“A teacher’s conference attended by the Ministry of Education. She’s getting a Hero of Labor.”

But in her own house, behind her mother’s back, the old woman talked. She called her names for every single time she found Nola staring out of the window or writing letters to no address that mother left behind.

“A flea-ridden bitch — that’s what that woman is!” the old woman muttered on repeat, when she discovered a clump of tangled hair above the nape of Nola’s neck which Nola harvested for nearly a year by then. The knot had grown so large, that during the summer, she began to pin her grandma’s rhinestone brooches into it.

No remedy was masterful enough to get that thing out! Lord knows, grandma tried! The naked old woman labored and puffed in the wet steam of her bathhouse, her deflated breasts flapping above Nola’s shoulders, like freshly baked Georgian lavashes. After two hours of brushing, oiling, lathering; of pulling and of being pulled; of swearing, sweating, renouncing; and baring and receiving — the hair had to be cut out; and Nola walked away with half of it missing from the back of her head and a headache that took days to sleep off.

The story tilted then. Inside her family, she never would be able to find much calm. That night, unable to find a spot on her scalp that wasn’t raw and throbbing, with the face down in her pillow, Nola would begin to plot her own escape, with or without her hair.

And now, here it was: Her thick and magical, red hair! It had began to slip out of its follicles and clog up all the drains in the apartment; and after every shower, the water drained slowly, allowing for the soap scum to settle on the walls of her tub, like growth rings on a cut down tree.

Must color mother’s hair, she decided. The shower head was dripping at an even pace against the standing pool of water, in the bathroom. Mom lost all memory. Her dignity did not belong to her. It mattered to the living though — to those who were living, trying, still — so, Nola owed someone that.

At first, it was the hair. Her thick, red hair, with angelic ringlets flocking the frame of her still cherubic face began to slip out of its follicles; and she would watch it slide along the body, in the shower — young garden snakes on sleet — flock her feet, like seaweed, before spiraling down into the drain.

“You ought to be careful, child! For hair like this, the other females will give you the bad eye!”

Her grandmother was a superstitious woman. With her thin, brittle fingers, she braided Nola’s curls into tame hair buns or the complex, basket-like constructions on top of her head, which by the end of a day, gave her headaches and made her eyes water.

The tedious ceremonies of the old world’s superstitions slowed down Nola’s childhood to half-speed. The pinning of safety pins to her underwear after bath, their heads facing downward and away from her heart — “grounding”; the triple twirling and the hanging of a rusty locket, with some dead priest’s hair, around her neck. Hemp ropes with strange beads tied around her wrists and ankles. Sometimes, when she drifted off to sleep — but not yet into her dreams — after her grandmother’s bedtime stories, she watched the shadows of the old woman move along the wall: A giant and magnificent bird casting the whispers of good winds upon her sleeping head. And in the mornings, when she wasn’t looking — grandmother would slip drops of blessed water into her glass of milk; then keep her hand behind her heart while Nola chugged it down. All that — to ward off the other women.

Where had this mistrust in the female kind come from? Nola couldn’t understand it. And as a child, she was particularly puzzled about that feared bad eye. Grandma had no tolerance for questions worked up by Nola’s imagination — a quality that later flared up in her own motherhood — so she came up with the answers on her own. (It was the worst — wasn’t it? — for a child to feel annoying, then dismissed by the habits of the bored and tired grownups. She hadn’t wanted to become like that! And yet, she was, right in the midst of it, now.) These had to be some evil women, Nola decided way back when; some ancient witches with an extra eye to give away. And they lived among the good and the kind, giving the rest of the womankind a terrible reputation.

One time, walking in her grandmother’s footsteps, through the pre-sunrise layer of the summer fog only to be seen in the Far, Far East of Russia (and in the magical place of which she’d read once, called “San Francisco”), she saw a yellow raincoat. It balanced on a pair of emaciated legs; and when they caught up with it, Nola looked back: An old woman, with wet gray hair stuck to her caved-in temples, was staring right back at her from underneath the bright yellow hood. She reminded Nola of one of those Mexican skeleton dolls of rich, exotic colors, dressed in human clothing that hung on them, like parachutes on manikins. From behind the fog that clung to every moving or inanimate object, she could hardly see the color of the woman’s eyes. They seemed to appear milky though, crowded with cataracts. But the sinister smile that stretched the old woman’s toothless mouth into a keyhole told Nola that she could see well enough to look right through into her heart.

She felt an icy shiver: A drop of accumulated rainwater slipped under her raincoat collar and began its slow avalanche down the back, along the spine, meeting up with other raindrops and her sudden sweat, growing, gaining weight; gaining momentum.

“Is this it?” Nola thought. Was this the female owner of the feared bad eye? Expecting a feeling of sickly slime, terrified yet thrilled at the same time, Nola slipped her hands into her pockets.

“Stop dragging your feet, like a tooth comb through my armpit hair!” her grandmother barked from a few steps ahead. Nola started running.

In adolescence, when all the other girls acquired breasts and waistlines, Nola cultivated auburn braids; and boys began communicating their flared-up desires by yanking them hard, that she would cry. And if ever she chased after one of such brutal Romeos, uncertain about her own manic urge, the hair whipped her back like two wet ropes.

At night, after her solitude was pretty much assured, she wrapped the clouds of her scratchy hair around her head, so she could doze off — off and away from the voices of her parents, bickering in the kitchen. (On planes, she dreamed that she could do the same to clouds. God bless her, soon enough!) When her braids began reaching the crests of her hips, Nola began the practice of making dolls out of them; and she would rest each on her pillow, next to her lips, and whisper to it her speculations about the far removed and kinder places.

“Is this how you care for your wife ‘n’ child?!” her mother would be squealing in the downstairs dirt room, if dad showed up tipsy from a few chugs of dark Russian beer.

From what Nola understood in other children’s reenactments in their shared sandboxes, her father was not a hopeless drunk at all: He never fell down in the alleys, later to be found by the female cashiers of the local delis, unlocking the back doors for early morning deliveries or briberies from those savvier Soviets who knew how to get their share of deficit produce to come that week. Never-ever, had father been taken to the Emergency Room on a sled — pulled by his same “wife ‘n’ child”, in a middle of the Russian winter — to get his stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning. No, Nola’s dad was just a jolly drunk, occasionally guilty of having a reason to celebrate something — anything! — in his Russian destiny: A National Fisherman Day. The fall of Bastille Saint Antoine. A successful summoning of mere three meals for his family, that day. Another Day in the Life of…

But mom went off, pulling at her own thinning hair, whenever the man showed up with that harmless — and actually endearing to Nola — goofy smile. Whenever Nina slipped out her bed and did an army crawl to the top of the stairs, she watched her mother’s body shiver, the skin of her arms vibrate, all — from what looked like an inside job. The woman wailed and howled, and threw herself against the hard surfaces and all the sharp corners, as if possessed by a death wish. Mom always took everything too far, into a place of difficult ultimatums and points beyond forgiveness. And watching her in such a state set off anxiety-ridden arrhythmia in Nola’s heart.

Her mother’s sad, all-knowing smile. Her choir of scoffs and sighs, and terrorizing whimpers. Her melancholic, slow head shake belonging to a cartoonish bobblehead stuck to a dashboard of a Moscow’s taxicab: getting around but not going anywhere! She felt an urge to run away from all of it — from here and from her — to somewhere, where people didn’t readily construct their painful sentences and woke up with faces drained of all curiosity or tenderness. Could that be “San Francisco”? She slept on pillows of her hair and wondered.